Sophie Hannah Quotes

Only Agatha Christie can write like Agatha Christie.

I was reading Agatha Christie as a little boy.

While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period when I read many of them. I absorbed the form, and I liked it, it was a good one, mostly the hard-boiled school, you know, Chandler, Hammett, and their heirs. That was the direction that interested me most.

The first proper mystery novel that I read was 'Murder On the Orient Express' with a gaunt David Niven and a cherubic Peter Ustinov on the cover. 'Orient Express,' you'll recall, is the one where everyone did it, which delighted me no end, and I was immediately hooked.

Scandinavian crime fiction has become a great success all across the world and rightfully so. Sjowall and Wahloo ushered in a whole generation of Swedish crime writers, many of whom are now available in English.

I've always been a secret locked-room fanatic. I read my first one when I was about ten or 11, Agatha Christie's 'Murder on the Orient Express,' with David Niven and Peter Ustinov on the cover.

I've always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

I think every writer of detective fiction writing today has been influenced by Mr. Parker. I'm of a generation that followed Robert Parker, and it was impossible to read the genre and not be influenced by him.

I absolutely adore Agatha Christie; so much so that when I received a kitten for my Christmas present, I called her Agatha, and I already have a cat called Hercule!

We all grew up aware of Agatha Christie; there is no writer more prolific than her in England.

I absolutely adore classic crime and read a huge amount as a teen - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Sherlock Holmes, Josephine Tey, and many more.

We tend to think of crime fiction as reading designed for entertainment - not education. It delivers an almost pure kind of readerly pleasure: the mystery solved, justice delivered, roughly or otherwise.

Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe.

I like murder mysteries, the Agatha Christie kinds of things where you know that it's all going to be neatly wound up at the end.

I learned everything I know about plot from Dame Agatha (Christie).

You write the facts as you see them, and there isn't a lull with a lot of description. No wonder people like to write about murder mysteries and dead bodies!

Bookstores never seem to know where to put me on the shelves. But I do. I love my genre and I love those writers, so I am happy to be considered a crime writer. That's what I consider myself.

I adore all Agatha Christie's books and turn to them whenever I'm ill or need cheering up.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

I don't think the Barbara Vines are mysteries in any sense. The Barbara Vine is much more slowly paced. It is a much more in-depth, searching sort of book; it doesn't necessarily have a murder in it.

I read all the Agatha Christies when I was younger and like Sherlock Holmes. Crime fiction has always fascinated me, but I'll read anything anyone gives me.

My crime novels are highly structured. I never start out with a dead body. I start with an impossible scenario. Opening questions should be mysterious, weird, intriguing, and contain the seeds of the solution. The structure has to be meticulous - I'm a structure freak.

I think I'm part of a generation of crime writers all of whom woke up independently and recoiled with horror at the fact that we'd chosen this very conservative genre.

Agatha Christie's writing is incredibly skillful because her books are incredibly intellectually puzzling and challenging.

I was never a fan of cozy mysteries of anything set in the countryside, you know.